The Duke had also seen minor but not negligible service in his own locality, serving twice in the past decade as Mayor of Woodstock, the little town that bordered on the Blenheim estates. Some of his fellow peers remained mayor of their local borough year in and year out, regularly returned by a grateful tenantry, but that was not to be the fate of Charles Spencer Churchill. After two terms he was voted out.
At ten o’clock it was his custom to meet with his Steward to discuss the business of the estate. Every day now the Steward made the question of the Ballets Russes the last item on the agenda. Her Ladyship – she might not have been a Ladyship outside the walls of the estate, Mrs Deacon was accustomed to tell friends and visitors, but she bloody well was inside the walls of the Palace – posed the question the Duke thought he had settled once and for all. What was he going to do about the Ballets Russes? Was he going to employ them to dance in the palace or not? Each day, with declining levels of firmness, the Duke had said no. After his meeting, the Duke took some coffee and looked at the racing magazines.
Under the normal domestic regimen, the Duke and his partner would have luncheon together, but the ‘together’ element had also been disrupted by the authorities upstairs. The Duke, who had always had a dread of eating alone, especially in that triumphant dining room with its works of art proclaiming a military victory that he would never achieve, took himself off to The Bear Hotel in Woodstock and ate in state in a private dining room. The Duke firmly believed that his dread of solitary mealtimes was known only to himself, but he was wrong. Once in his cups at Monte Carlo, he had shouted to Gladys that if she didn’t hurry up he would have to eat alone in that bloody great hotel dining room and that he would, therefore, be the only person doing so. The shame and the boredom, he had yelled through her dressing-room door, would finish him off. Mrs Deacon, unlike the Duke, did not forget very much, but she saved this information for particularly important campaigns, like invitations to Royal Garden Parties or inviting Diaghilev to Blenheim.
What does a Duke do in the afternoons? The 9th Duke of Marlborough was accustomed to walking his estates and checking on the recent work he had ordered. But that was difficult now because half the estate, the half running away from the house past the Palladian bridge up towards the obelisk was destined to be the home of dancing nymphs and the glories of the corps de ballet, if Mrs Deacon had her way. Even his new water garden failed to bring any cheer, the water spouting away in splendour into the late afternoon sun. And his customary large gin at six thirty sharp, the starting pistol for an evening’s refreshment, failed to lift his spirits as he looked at a couple of his ancestors on the walls, destined, like him, never to shine as brightly as the 1st Duke of Marlborough.
Then it was that damned dining room once more, the footmen specifically instructed never to speak in Her Ladyship’s presence, or – by extension of Her Ladyship’s command – to him either. They glided in, taking this plate away and bringing another one in. They hovered discreetly about his glass, with this evening a bottle of his cellar’s finest St Emilion. Even though he had perhaps been – in Lloyd George’s memorable phrase – one of five hundred men chosen at random from the ranks of the unemployed to sit in the House of Lords, the Duke had been brought up to expect and to exercise some measure of power in his own and in the wider world. This was intolerable. The Duke knew that there was a siege in progress, but whether he was the attacking or the defending power he had no idea. His adversary, still taking her meals in solitary splendour upstairs, had no doubt on that question. The Duke was under siege and the Ballets Russes at Blenheim was the prize.
It was the guinea fowl that did it, a guinea fowl served with a rich cream sauce with truffles and mushrooms that finally destroyed the remnants of the Duke’s resistance. He remembered eating a similar dish years before at some grand military dinner at the Carlton Club. He asked for pen, paper and envelope. He wrote out the terms of his surrender. But the lady in question did not abandon the field that evening. She made him wait until after breakfast the following morning.
Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had found his translator at last. She was a teacher, Anna Okenska, and plied her trade at one of London’s leading public schools for girls. The students were delighted to hear that Miss Okenska would be away from school until further notice. Miss Okenska had the reputation of being very strict in class and even stricter in the matter of homework. Miss Irene Delarue, who replaced her, was always susceptible to diversions in class and bouts of generosity on the question of the prompt arrival of written work from home.
Sergeant Jenkins found Anna difficult at first, with her strict dark clothes and no apparent interest in important things like football. But their relationship began to thaw when they discovered a common love of the ballet, for Sergeant Jenkins had taken his mama again after that first rapturous evening. For some reason she only wanted to come when Nijinsky was dancing, or ‘on the menu’, as she put it.
Their task – and it was not a happy one – was to find the strangers whom M. Fokine had identified as wandering round the back of the Royal Opera House during performances. So far they had found two messengers bringing items from the corps de ballet hotel that had been left behind before performances; one drunk who was obsessed with the ballet but too poor to buy a ticket and too far gone to understand what was going on if he had; an eccentric accountant who passed by on his way home eager for a sniff of the world of the Ballets Russes (as his wife would divorce him if he ever went to a performance); and an old lady tramp, festooned with castoffs, who came along to see if any useful clothing had been left behind. This person, Miss Olenska maintained in the face of all opposition, was Sherlock Holmes in disguise, since he often used disguise in such clothes and must be bored to death with those bloody bees in Sussex. There was also, one witness said, a middle-aged man in a long coat who looked foreign.
General Peter Kilyagin was staring moodily at a telegram from his masters in St Petersburg. His faithful deputy Major Tashkin was on the other side of the desk, waiting for orders. The Major usually dealt with the rougher side of things and kept in regular contact with the outstations of violence and torture.
‘Why would Lenin courier London?’ said the General crossly. ‘You’d think they had no bloody money left for telegrams, wouldn’t you? And then it goes on for nearly half a page: our assessment of the purposes of the visit; if this is meant to spark a signal of outbreaks of revolutionary violence across Europe; if it means that there is to be a revolution in England; if Lenin has plans to come to the English capital? I ask you. Have they nothing better to do back there?’
‘It may depend on which faction of the Okhrana or which faction in the Winter Palace sent it,’ said the Major, who would have liked nothing better than to get his hands, literally, on Lenin and sweep him off to one of his special offices where the nearest neighbours were ten kilometres or more away.
‘It is hard to tell who the hell is sending the bloody messages sometimes,’ admitted the General.
‘But the answer’s obvious, surely,’ said the Major. ‘He’s come to find out about the money. Have they got it or haven’t they? That’s all. Come to think of it, General, have they got the money or haven’t they? You’ve been in touch with our man in London, surely?’
‘Any day now, Major. Maybe later today we’ll hear about the money. I think they’ll get it myself. The interesting thing is what are they going to do with the money when they’ve got it. If you were in charge, at long range, of a group of people about to come into such enormous sums, what do you think they’d do with it?’
‘That depends on the hold Lenin has on them, doesn’t it? They could steal half of it for themselves. They could steal most of it for themselves. I can’t see the whole total going straight to Comrade Lenin out there in Cracow, I just can’t see it.’
‘Think of it another way, General. This courier can’t expect to bring the money back himself, can he? He’d be picked up at every customs house between here and Warsaw. So what is
he doing?’
The General laughed. ‘Paranoia perhaps, Major. Imagine you are Comrade Lenin, on the run most of the time, forced to take up residence wherever our secret police or somebody else’s secret police may keep an eye on you but won’t actually pick you up and send you back to Russia. I can never understand why somebody’s secret police doesn’t just kill the bugger and be done with it. It might bring forth a howl of squeals and wails from the liberal Press and parliamentarians, but across the whole Continent, honest law-abiding citizens could sleep more easily in their beds, even if they’d never heard of the Lenin person in the first place.’
‘You don’t suppose Lenin wants to do something with the money once his man has got it?’
‘Do what? Order a few hampers of the finest food from Fortnum and Mason’s for immediate delivery to that café in Cracow? God knows. Why did he send the money to London and not to Milan, for God’s sake? Does he have a better way of getting it out of London that we don’t know about? That could be anything or anybody: Duke’s family with left-wing daughter going to Marienbad to take the waters, dozens and dozens of bloody trunks, all stuffed with useless clothes you could hide the money in?’
The General looked at his telegram once more. ‘I’ll just have to send the usual reply. I must have sent it so many times they’ll think it’s the last version, come again by mistake.’
The General picked up a pad in front of him. ‘Here we go again. “Important intelligence germane to your inquiry expected this office within twenty-four hours. Will send details once received. Yours, Kilyagin.”’
Lady Ripon called shortly after seven o’clock in the morning, as if she expected the world to be ready for action.
‘Powerscourt!’ she bawled. ‘Some of your people must have been talking out of turn. There’s been a leak. The story is all over the Daily Mail. I’ve talked to the proprietor already. He says all the journalists in the capital will be onto the story by lunchtime, if not before. What do you propose to do about it?’
Powerscourt felt slightly annoyed at having his morning disrupted with such a rude message.
‘You didn’t feel able to tell your Press lord’s friends to pull the story from their pages and instruct all the rest of the newspapers to do the same? Surely you’re capable of that, Lady Ripon?’
‘I did think of that, believe me, but I could hear one of his men in the background saying that it could prove very good for circulation. I think the man said that nobody’s going to check what’s written about St Petersburg, it’s too far away.’
‘Give me half an hour, Lady Ripon. I’ll have a plan. And you might ask the chairman and the general manager of the Royal Opera House to be ready to appear in public later this morning. Don’t bother with the Ballets Russes – I’ll talk to them, but I doubt very much if they’ll put in an appearance. Anyway, the journalists won’t speak French, let alone Russian.’
‘This is the very devil, Lucy,’ he said to his wife who was sorting out a slightly earlier breakfast. ‘The journalists have got wind of the murder at the opera house. Every one of them will be sniffing round the bloody story now. Dead dancer from foreign parts slain in the heart of theatreland. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I’m off to the study and that better telephone line. I’m going to get hold of Rosebery and Patrick Butler from The Times.’
Rosebery was an old friend of the family and a former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. He could tell you the name of the oil that lubricated the passages of power in Whitehall and Westminster. Patrick Butler had been involved in a previous Powerscourt investigation as a young editor in the provinces, and was now deputy home editor of The Times. Powerscourt told them all he knew, including about Johnny Fitzgerald’s interviews with the dead Alexander’s aunt.
Rosebery’s advice showed his experience in handling cases of this kind. ‘You’ve got to keep them concentrating on St Petersburg, the theatre school he will have attended, the performances he will have taken part in at the Mariinsky Theatre. Order up a couple of ballerinas who knew him well to give glowing accounts of his personality. Find a translator who can do the business for them to be interviewed about four o’clock this afternoon wearing their skimpiest tutus. That should take care of the next morning. Once the vermin get hold of the English angle, English mother and two aunts living here in London, you’ve lost control of the story. You’ve had it. They’ll print anything. One last thought: say there’s a talk of a memorial night for him, some scholarship, maybe, to his theatre school in St Petersburg.’
Patrick Butler agreed totally with keeping hold of the story. ‘It’s the devil of a job for the participants, Lord Powerscourt. Here’s what I would suggest. Chairman and general manager of the Royal Opera House on parade at the Royal Opera House this morning. On the proper stage, with the journalists sitting in the front rows of the stalls. That’ll help to keep them quiet. What is needed is a lot of sonorous verbiage that means nothing but sounds good: Anglo-Russian relations, bereaved families, St Petersburg in mourning. You could write that sort of stuff with your eyes closed, my lord, pretend you’re an orotund bishop whose best choirboy has been found murdered in the choir stalls. And, most importantly, say there will be a conference every morning at eleven and another at four o’clock, beginning today, and at the same times every day and afternoon after that. Book a couple more ballerinas – I presume the supply line must be almost inexhaustible – and the Russian Ambassador for tomorrow afternoon. Couple of aged metropolitans with enormous beards for the day after. Now, I’d better go and organize the ring round the newspapers or the journalists won’t turn up.’
Powerscourt began drafting speeches for the chairman and the general manager of the Royal Opera House. There was, of course, one flaw in the preparations for the morning of mourning in Covent Garden, and that was the man who had raised the alarm in the first place, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, with his large collection of investment trusts and wide experience cheating at cards across the river in Barnes. Powerscourt arranged to meet him at his home in Barnes at eleven o’clock in an attempt to keep him out of the picture for the events of the morning. The English end had to be stopped for as long as possible. Keep it out of the papers for a week or so, Patrick Butler had told him, and the journalists won’t be interested in any uncles – alive or dead – after that.
At eleven o’clock Powerscourt the speechwriter was on parade on the stage of the Royal Opera House. The journalists had their notebooks open and pencils ready. Powerscourt’s representative in Covent Garden was Lord Roderick Johnston, chairman of the Royal Opera House and a dozen other companies:
‘. . . a sad day indeed in the long history of friendship between our two countries . . . young life, so full of promise, so brutally cut short . . . extend our deepest sympathy to the ballet authorities in St Petersburg and to the theatre school where the young man learned his trade over so many years . . . sympathy and condolences to the bereaved family who live, we understand, just off that great artery of life in the Russian capital, the Nevskii Prospekt . . .’
The other Powerscourt was being shown to a seat in the residence of Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, whose walls were filled with a fine collection of English landscapes.
‘Mr Gilbert,’ Powerscourt began, ‘how kind of you to see me at short notice this morning. Lady Ripon asked me to look into the sad affair of your nephew. Let me say how sorry I am. It must be terrible to have the joy of a dear relative come to stay, only for that stay to be so tragically cut short.’
‘Our capital has been graced in recent years with many musical delights from your great country. Only last year did we first make acquaintance with Monsieur Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes . . . think I can say without exception that we have fallen in love with that ballet, so original, so full of life, and that the love affair continues with as much passion today as it showed that first day they danced in London . . .’
‘Thank you very much for coming to see me, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Gilbert. ‘It is much appreciated. H
e was such a dear boy, Alexander, so much loved by all who knew him.’
There was something about the way Richard Gilbert looked at you, Powerscourt thought, a combination of slyness and a leer, that left you thinking his main objective was to get the better of you, or to win you over to some shady deal.
‘There is this morning, Mr Gilbert, a press conference at the Royal Opera House with the chairman and the general manager telling the journalists what has been going on and outlining the opera house’s plan for keeping the Press in touch in the days ahead. We, Lady Ripon and I, did not feel that the strain of those journalistic enquiries, the constant questioning of your staff at work and the people who look after you here, was one that it would be fair to subject you to at this time.’
‘Let us not forget,’ the chairman was nearing the end of the speech now, ‘the wider context in which this affair sits, the close relations between our two countries and the joint role we play in international affairs . . . These are troubled times, with the threat of war, which seemed so impossible before, now threatening to darken the lives of all the countries on the continent of Europe. Let us hope that the flame of friendship between England and Russia, which does so much to keep peace alive in our time, may burn brighter yet because of this tragedy . . . may it serve to bring about a happy state where the people by the Neva may live at peace with the people of the Thames and people all over Europe, and that the forces working for international peace may be stronger tomorrow than they were yesterday . . .’
Death Comes to the Ballets Russes Page 11